Cancer has no religious persuasion
Many people out there have had to deal with the impact of cancer at some point in their lives. For me it was the loss of a loved one, my father. Time flows along and people in the medical field continue their battles against the disease. I’ve written recently about a giant step forward announced at the beginning of the month where a treatment completely obliterated the cancer in 2 of the test’s subjects. I called it “tremendously good news” at the time and I stand by that assessment today.
My attitude toward cancer treatments makes me incapable of understanding the stance some of my fellow conservatives are taking with regard to a vaccine now available that grants immunity to the human papillomavirus, or HPV. The HPV has been discovered to be the cause of some types of cervical cancer in women. The vaccine will stop it. Ergo, you can successfully prevent certain types of cancer in women with a simple vaccine much as we can halt measles or chicken pox with an innoculation. Under what pretenses could someone suggest that’s a bad thing?
Turns out there are those who suggest that such an innoculation would encourage young women to engage in sexual relations. Their premise is that if the danger of developing cancer that could lead to disfigurement or death is present then the girls will choose to remain celibate until marriage. Catherine Seipp over at Pajamas Media lands a mortal blow to that kind of twisted thinking:
As I explained to my daughter, the purest of purity ring-wearing girls could remain a sanctified virgin until she got married – and then still get infected by her new husband the night of their wedding if he hadn’t been quite so chaste. People make mistakes, but that doesn’t mean they deserve to die – or lose their fertility (a more common result of cervical cancer, at least now in the U.S.) – because of it.
An anti-STD vaccine no more encourages promiscuity than locking your doors at night encourages burglars. Sure, it would be a fine thing if we lived in the best of all possible worlds, where locked doors and vaccines were unneccessary because burglars and diseases don’t exist. But we don’t live in that kind of world.
My own thoughts on the matter centered on the reliance on a disease as an enforcer of morality. I cannot see the intelligence of saying that young women will find themselves at the moment of deciding whether to hop into the sack with a guy and that the possibility of them contracting HPV will enter into the equation. As it stands today, a casual fling with a relatively unknown person risks sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, syphilis, and a whole list of others that can literally kill you if left untreated. Others, such as herpes, have no cure. Then, of course, there’s the cureless and lethal AIDS – to say nothing of the risk of unintended pregnacy, let us not forget. Is it really reasonable to think that a woman would completely ignore all of those risks yet pull up short and say, “Oooo, I better not do this. I might get the HPV.”
No, not hardly. Opposition to this vaccine that’s based upon a fear that it might encourage women to have sex out of wedlock is irrational. It’s a desperate grab at anything to advance a moral position and it’s both disgusting and embarrassing to the rest of the conservative side of political thought. If the vaccine is otherwise safe, there is no reason to oppose it from a conservative perspective. Any conservative who would stand against the availability of this vaccine and yet innoculates their children against all the various diseases we vaccinate for today is a hypocrite and nothing more.
